NetNews MinutesMinutes from the NetNews Working Group Session at RIPE 24https://www.ripe.net/participate/meetings/ripe-meetings/ripe-24/netnews24.txthttps://www.ripe.net/logo.png

NetNews Minutes

Minutes from the NetNews Working Group Session at RIPE 24

Netnews Working group Minutes of the 1st meeting in Berlin, April 22, 1996

Chair: Felix KuglerScribe: Felix Kugler

0. Introduction

Welcome to the first meeting. The participants list was passed, therewere 21 attendees. Nobody wanted to risk being scribe and it took sometime to find a "volunteer'. Unfortunatly, it was impossible later onto get the notes. The minutes are now based on the chair's sparse notes.

There were no changes proposed to the agenda.

1. News traffic analysis

Felix Kugler presented a number of slides showing how News trafficgrew from March 95 to March 96, both in terms of articles (+40%) anddata volume (+400%). Measurement point was a SWITCH News server. Thealt hierarchy now dominates News traffic with approx. 85% of the totalvolume, and it has by far the highest growth. The daily trafficpattern shows that still most articles originate in US. We seetraffic peaks during US-"active hours" corresponding to night tomid-morning in Europe. Interstingly, weekend data volumes are muchhigher nowadays and the average article size is significantly higherat those times. Slides are available from ftp://ftp.switch.ch/info_service/netnews/wg/ripe24/nnwg-slides.ps.gz.

Conclusion: News traffic is growing at a breathtaking pace and adds upa considerable amount of the total traffic of a typical network. Thelion's share of News volume is in the alt hierarchy. The good news isthat Netnews traffic peaks at times where Europeans use less bandwidthfor interactive work.

1.2 Analysis of today's News distribution paths

Heiko Rupp (XLINK) presented the model of his path analysis system. Anumber of well connected sites define a special channel on their Newsserver which pipes header information of every incoming News articleinto a Perl script. The script parses the Path:-header line and fillsa database of transmitted articles between adjacent news servers. Anextract of this database is sent to Heikos workstation on a regularbasis where the data is combined and analyzed. Fancy scripts createPostscript maps automagically. The resulting maps are available onXlink's WWW server. They are considered examples only because onlythree measuring sites - located at XLINK (DE), SWITCH (CH), andUniversity of Pisa (IT) - were used for the prove of concept.

This work got much attention. Heiko will improve his scripts andannounce them when ready. He takes care that no patches on theinstalled news server software is needed which would make the packagedifficult and dangerous to install.

Two potential weaknesses were pointed out: the maps are based on thearticle count and not on the transmitted data volume which isconsidered more important for the underlying network, furthermore thegraphs ado not show the direction of newsflow. It was decided to stickwith what we have now and make this operational. In a later phase thepackage could be enhanced to address the problems mentioned before.

Three additional ISPs volunteered to install and run the scripts for"production": ACONET (AT), DEMON (UK), TELIA (SE). For a reasonablecoverage, more measuring sites will be needed. This can beaccomplished offline.

In the "production phase", data shall be collected once per week. Moredetails will be announced later. Heiko's slides are available from ftp://ftp.xlink.net/pub/news/docs/ripe24-netnews-wg.tar.gz.

2. Minimizing Netnews resource usage

2.1 Transatlantic newsfeeds

It was agreed that avoiding waste of transatlantic bandwidth has toppriority. Low latency interconnections between European endpoints ofUS-feeds shall minimize multiple transmission of articles over theexpensive transatlantic links.

In fact, part of this News Backbone already exists, and it evencrosses the boundaries of the "big" European service providers.Unfortunatly, the latency is in many cases clearly too high, mostlydue to overloaded News servers and links. There are only few serverswith online monitoring facilities so that the performance of manyservers often can be guessed only after a certain time when localstatistics are available.

Based on the newsflow maps and "human experience" the newsfeedtopology should be improved and a News backbone be realized. As soonas this fast European News Backbone works well and reliably, areduction of the number of US-feeds can be considered.

Gerhard Winkler (ACONET) points out the value of local peeringsbecause bandwidth costs are negligible in most cases. However, localpeerings might be difficult to arrange for competitive considerationswhen the newsflow between the peers is heavily unbalanced.

2.2 coordination of intra-ISP News distribution

It was tried to get an idea from the attendees how News is distributedwithin the international ISP's networks. The resulting picture is veryincomplete and to be interpreted with caution.

DANTE: No managed News service so far but plans to start a project. Central NRN's with multiple international links usually have good, bilaterally coordinated newsfeeds, single attached NRN's have more problems to get feed. Contact: Felix Kugler, SWITCH

EBONE: No managed News service, no central coordination. It is reported that the informal coodination works well and that every connected network can get a full feed for free from a neighboring network. Contact: Gerhard Winkler, ACONET

PIPEX: Runs several News servers so that there is usually only one feed on an international link. Contact: Mark Turner, PIPEX UK

The contacts mentioned above do not necessarily denote responsiblepersons, but usually well informed people.

2.3 other methods to save resources

Dropping newsgroups/hierarchies with excessive volumes (all kind ofbinaries) is considered a bad move though pushing binary stuff ontoftp/WWW-servers would be a reasonable goal. The problem is how tofilter out binaries. The obvious first approach would be to filterbased on the newsgroup name. However, binaries are often posted tonon-binary groups exactly to bypass such newsgroup exclusions.Filtering based on article size will most probably not work either. Itjust leads to smaller but more fragments and reduces the probabilitythat a binary gets transmitted completly, thus triggering numerous"please repost" requests.

Mikael Kullberg (TELIA) remarks that it was probably a mistake toenlarge the maximum fragment size on Usenet from 64kB to typically 1MB.It is probably not possible in practice to go back to smallerfragments in a coordinated way, so we have to live with the bigfragments we have now.

The use of intelligent (dynamic) servers and proxies is consideredinteresting for leaf sites. It is not a topic for the WG at themoment.

A list of News servers with available monitoring information isplanned to be setup after the meeting.

4. Tools

This agenda item too was postponed due to time constraints. It waspointed out that Dave Barr maintains very complete INN pages on hisWWW server with a bunch of useful tools. Checkhttp://www.math.psu.edu/barr/INN.html for more info.

innfeed, a new INN backend program, is now in beta-phase. Though itstill has some etches it is considered an important improvement overtoday's nntpsend/nntplink programs. It will be part of future INNreleases.

5. The future of Netnews distribution

Apart from improvements of the current News transmission technology,fundamentally different ways to transport News are possible. Keywordsare satellite transmission and IP multicast.

Satellite transmission is already in use at least in the US, but noneof the attendees had detailed knowledge or experiences about this.

Heiko Rupp (XLINK) gave a short introduction about News transport viaIP multicast. UUNET obviously has experimented with this technologysome time ago, but gave up for the moment due to limitations in theirimplementation (a 9kB size limit imposed by UDP code) and the factthat no reliable multicast network is in operation yet. There was apresentation on a USENIX conference about their system. Check thedocument "Drinking from the Waterhose" by K. Lidl and J. Osborn,http://www.va.pubnix.com/staff/stripes/muse/usenix-muse.ps.gz fordetailed info.

6. Central info point for Netnews distribution

This agenda item was dropped. The WG will take care of this as soon asthere is a need for an info point.

7. Closing

The netnews WG is likely to meet again at the next meeting, but afinal decision is postponed.

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